Norman - The Demon Nerd

Hollowmind

Finally finished the skin on this guy. Time to move on to animating him. Let me know what you think.


Here are the links to the flats:

Norman_head.jpg

Norman_body.jpg

mr.toast

looks nice, i love the texture, the body reminds me of andariel's from diablo 2

lkraan

Cool design and skin!

He really needs a pocket protector on his shirt and tape on his glasses (2 parts where it bends and between the 2 lenses)
Since his shirt is all bloody I assume he's been doing some slaying. Maybe add some blood to the ends of the tentacles.

Neo_God

lol, looks great! Looks like it could be in it's own horror series. Probably go by the same title too "Norman - Demon Nerd" But Demon nerd would be all bloody...

Hollowmind

Thanks for the positive feedback. I think I will add the tape to the glasses. I didn't add a pocket protecter and pens cause it would get in the way of his suspenders.

adam

Haha Hollowmind this guy looks cool. He reminds me a lot of Baxter from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I would of done the set of arms coming from his back a little thinner but thats just my preference - kinda looks like he'd be fallin' over from the weight of those sucks (what with his nerdy composure and all, hehe).

Great model man. Good character - now animate the sumbitch!

Hollowmind

Hehe, he'll be more hunched over when I animate him so that he doesn't look so off balance with those fuckers coming out of his back.

RazorBladder

That's pretty neat, seeing the WIP I was somewhat skeptical about how it would turn out but you've certainly thrown it into the right direction
The texture's looking great but to me it seems he's got way too many muscles in his neck.

Hollowmind

Hehe, he's got way too many muscles and tendons everywhere. I kinda' made up a lot of his anatomy. I'll try to be more realistic with my next model. I was going for a stylized look with this one.

swampbug

I've always liked this model, and idea. It came to me just now. It totally would fit in a Maniac mansion style.

I really like the face and the smile, and the glazed over glasses. He's an excellent contrast of nerd and horrible creature.

good job.

Hollowmind

I finally got this guy rigged and I've started animating him. Thought I'd post the anims I have done and see what you guys think. Took me a while to get him rigged and to get used to animating in Max since I'm still learning.

Norman WalkF
Norman RunF
Norman Idle_Rest

Hollowmind

Ok, my website is being stingy with my bandwith. Guess I'll have to actually pay for a site one of these days. Anybody willing to host these avi's for me so I can get some crits?

Hollowmind

Alright, I buckled down and bought a domain name and some web space so these should work this time. Please let me know what you think.

Norman_Idle_Rest.avi
Norman_Walk.avi
Norman_Run.avi

MoP

I like the walk and idle a lot. Nice and fluid.
The run seems very stiff, though, I think it's because his pelvis doesn't swing from side to side or go up and down as much as it should.
The run is good, but it's not quite excellent yet, I think.
Nice secondary motion on the weird arms coming out of his back though.
Good work all round! It's not often you see someone who can model, uv-map, texture and animate well.

Hollowmind

Thanks for the compliments MoP. I'll work on the run a bit more. His upper body movement is too jerky and his left hand kinda jumps around on the gun. I'm not sure what to do with the hips not rotating. This is my first time using Max to animate and biped seems to be a little odd in some ways. It won't let me rotate his pelvis and it doesn't seem to want to keyframe rotation of the Bip 01 (is that usually referred to as the COM?). Maybe I'm wrong but that's how I'm remembering it right now.

I need to learn to build my own rigs. Seems people really don't like the biped anymore.

avalean

How about when he runs he floats?

Hollowmind

avalean: Floors are overrated.

I updated his run anim. Made his upper body movement a lot smoother and more natural looking in my opinion. Uploaded a couple more idle anims as well. I'm not sure what the Idle_Character animation is for but I found it in the UT2k4 animation list so I decided to do something odd for it. It's kind of an embarassed and frustrated kind of gesture. Anyways, let me know what you think.

Norman_Run.avi
Norman_Idle_Character.avi
Norman_Idle_Rifle.avi

Hollowmind

Finally finished this guy. Let me know what you think. Did all the animations myself and even included custom ragdoll data for him.

You can download him here:
NormanUT2004.zip

In-game screenshots:
Norman_screenshot1.jpg
Norman_screenshot2.jpg
Norman_screenshot3.jpg
Norman_screenshot4.jpg
Norman_screenshot5.jpg
Norman_screenshot6.jpg

Steakhouse

wow he turned out pretty solid in the end. Nice job Hollow.

adam

Man this guy turned out really solid. Glad to see you kept with it... good job man. His smile is great

Still reminds me of Baxter!

e_x

couple of animation crits

Walk cycle - everything starts and stops at the same time. give it some overlap, delay the tenticles a little bit, maybe give them a little up and down too. this will give them some weight. he doesn't look like he has much left to right movement either, maybe its just the angle though

Run cycle - again, everything starts and stop at the same time. here, the tenticles should have a definate bounce to them, even if they are ready to strike. Some spine bob would be nice with some overlapping head bobbing too. Maybe a little more up and down compression and extension, give him some weight as well. Also, his left hand slides a little holding the gun. nothing big, but it annoys me...

Idle - The big thing with idles is overlapping. his pelvic up and down shouldn't be at the same frames as his spine up and down. you can make it look nice by delaying his sping a few frames to get him doing a sort of wave up and down (hope you follow that). Delay each tenticle a little more too so they aren't all moving and stopping at the same time. I think the idle is too fast, but that might just be my personal preference.

Good start though, hopefully you keep at it.

Hollowmind

Thanks for the compliments and crits. Glad you guys like him.

e_x: Yeah, I know those anims are a little rough still. Funny thing is those are the first anims I did, hehe. I don't think I'll go back and fix them right now. I've been working on this guy for about 4 months now and I really want to get started on my next model. I'll keep those crits in mind though when I work on that one. His death animation was the last one I did and I think I did much, much better on the overlapping movement on that one, unfortunately you'll probably never see that anim in-game.

Anyways, have fun with him and for my next model I have something a lot more twisted in mind.